One Day Wonder #188

For 3 trumpets.

I was a little short on time today, because – saints be praised! – my Finale upgrade finally arrived. More on that later. What I wanted to do was simple: write for trumpets in very close harmony. That’s exactly what you get. It’s a peppy, zippy and very spirited track that references the bygone fanfare format. I especially like the sixteenth-note passages. They’ll be pretty tough to play as uniformly as the Finale playback. This might be the only time I say this, but I believe that this robo-track could possibly be the only case of a Finale performance surpassing a human rendition. I can’t be totally sure, but I think even studly trumpet players will have trouble with this tune. But it's not like I was chuckling to myself while I was writing it, going: "Heh, heh, this is gonna be really difficult! Heh, heh!" Anyway, I like this piece a lot. And now, as promised, a word or two about the Finale 2008 upgrade. Sadly, it sucks. To make matters even worse, it sucks even more than Finale 2006. I wish it wasn’t so, but it is. My problems with 2006 was that it slowed the evolution of Mackris v. O’Reilly to a crawl. Playback was so awful and distorted that I had to stop writing for a few days to square away the trouble. Their tech support seemed completely surprised by what I was telling them. They said it was all a matter of assigning each instrument a channel. But even when I did that, everything still sounded awful. I thought the Garratin Personal Orchestra (GPO) would save me, but it sounded even worse. Imagine that you’re playing a video game from the eighties. It has music playing in the background, right? Well, if you added a ton of reverb, that’s what many of the GPO patches sounded like. And the fact that the GPO had such limited instrument selection, didn’t win me over to the cause. I mean, I was writing extensively for D trumpet and there was no GPO option for it. The Finale tech guy told me that I should just write it for Bb trumpet and change it out later. Hey, I don’t roll like that, Mr. Tech Support. Lastly, the interface was a joke. I think they were trying to corner the market on musically illiterate DJs with those silly balance and reverb features. After three weeks of tearing out my hair, I sent it back and finished Mackris v. O’Reilly with Finale 2005, which is buggy as all get-out (especially when it comes to score/part printing), but at least it’s predictably buggy. I figured that the 2008 version would have sorted out all this crap and offered me a scad of muting options. I was wrong. Although the stupid level adjustments are gone, everything else is as bad or worse than I remember. Playback still sounds awful no matter what I do, the GPO is still terrible and the only muted brass patch is still only trumpet with a Harmon. Why did I buy this?? On top of that, installation was a nightmare (OK, maybe my computer was mostly responsible for that) that took nearly two hours to complete because the system kept crashing. Lordy, it’s seriously the worst thing ever. I’ll stick with 2005, thank you. I learned from my 2006 experience that I shouldn’t upgrade any files to the newer version unless I’m completely overjoyed with the new version's performance. What followed the departure of 2006 was a mass of reverse engineering that further slowed down the MvO’R process. It was a nightmare. Now, after playing around on 2008 for a few hours, I know that it’s going to go the way of 2006. How am I supposed to write music on such a crummy program?? The way it is, I’ll spend a little more time trying to make it work. Maybe I’ve missed something really big, but I don’t think so. I’ll give it a few days and play around with it to see if it isn’t as perfectly horrible as I think it might be. So there you have it: piece for trumpets, good; Finale upgrade, terrible.